I've been keeping quiet about the mass school shooting in Florida some weeks ago because it's such a hot-button topic, and many people speaking out are catching harrassment and death threats - even the students who survived the massacre. Of course, the National Rifle Association went on the record as saying, quote, "The NRA doesn't back any ban." Meaning, of course, they'll do their damndest to hamstring any new legislation that has to do with guns. It's also worth noting that there were multiple law enforcement officers - trained and armed - at the school, and they did nothing. Which isn't surprising to me; if they're anything like the police in the school I went to, they went out of their way to not do their jobs (the students selling both drugs and guns I graduated with did so with relative impunity). Oh, and let's not forget what can happen if you play the part of the hero and disarm the shooter - the cops think the hero's the shooter, and open fire. No good deed goes unpunished.

But that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is gun culture, as someone who's part of it, but who stays as far away from it as possible.

As I write this, it's roughly a week before my 40th birthday. I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room tapping away on Windbringer while Lyssa undergoes surgery to remove a cataract from her left (and only working) eye.* When this post goes live on the day of my actual 40th birthday, more things will undoubtedly have happened. I don't know how much time I'm going to have in the next few days, so I guess I'd best take advantage of the spare time I have due to how busy I've been lately.

I guess I should wish everybody out there a happy Thanksgiving that celebrates it.

I haven't been around much lately, certainly not as much as I would like to be. Things have been difficult lately, to say the least.

Around this time of year things go completely berserk at my dayjob. For a while I was pulling 14 hour days, capped off with feverishly working three days straight on one of the biggest projects of my career, which not only wound up going off without more than the expected number of hitches but has garnered quite a few kudos from the community. I'm rather proud of how it turned out. Unfortunately, it also took its toll, namely, on my health. During the final leg of the project I noticed that I was starting to get sick, and by that Tuesday my cow-orkers were telling me to go home and sleep because I looked like death warmed over. Unsurprisingly, I've been battling a nasty cold that's kicked the legs out from under me. I still haven't kicked out of big-project mode yet, because the last few times I've started to feel better I've run myself aground again without realizing I was doing so. This is not good. It also seems that I brought this particular nasty home, and now my family is in various stages of fighting it off.